ART NUKO AND THE BUNKER By Arthur Dabney Illustrations & Photos by Carl Chaplin AKA Dr. Nuko II along the edge of British Columbia, the glacier-covered Coast Mountains form a jumbled barrier. The dominating peaks of the Seven Sisters stand out against the incoming Pacific front, allowing a microclimate behind them. There along the banks of the Skeena River the 1940’s technology of the US Army Corps of Engineers has bulldozed and paved the rough terrain into a mile- long airstrip. My Cessena 185 lands easily, using only a portion of the pavement. At the end of the runway, in one of the few remaining buildings in the deserted town of Woodcock, Carl Chaplin makes his studio and home. The building was originally a reinforced concrete communications bunker. From here he paints ominous visions of a world gone mad as he waits for civilization to come to a climax. He greets me as I jump to the ground. The plane is secured and I do a three- sixty, amazed that anybody gets to live full-time in such rugged splendor. “You’re lucky,” he comments on the clear sky as we walk to the studio. “ Usually it’s cloudy and raining.” From the outside the studio looks stark but with more windows than I expected. In fact, inside it’s very bright. “The original glass was all that thick shatterproof ,chronicIe of j isl^times NuclearJAgelttiis! : ul Ij i m'eVaspopkiBiij k subscribeXt%tl^fiistoncffiefinitio^ | inteanslcomin^ F jh as^ n a lly^c r e a te d l^ । destroy civilizatidnj^ ^ .roy ^ ^ I P^2y^ v e r»t h e +sajef<W ^ •v StarJn^antasyland pmentffi t i?3Fema inmgfcardsf to y hemy ro z e n f i i^ Iockfof] packaqV?arp ^ ^ •meltdown. . stuff with chicken wire mesh in it—in case the Japanese bombed it,” he says, pouring a cup of coffee. “ It took the first couple of years just to knock out the old glass and put in the clear panes.” I guess I was expecting shelves of canned goods, stacks of survival gear and racks of rifles on the inside, but instead the fourteen-foot-high walls are covered with paintings of wildlife and mountains. Some of them quite large. One in particular catches my eye: a kid plays hide ‘n’ seek in a jungle of leaf nodules with a spider mite enlarged tens of thousands of times. But nowhere are the megaton paintings that I’d heard so much about. When I comment on their absence, he explains that the only two unsold pieces are on display at the Vancouver Peace Centre. “They’ re meant for public view. They wouldn’t do too much good hidden way up here.” “When I first saw one of your Art Nuko postcards, I was with several other people. One woman looked at the card and gave it back right away. She didn’t want to even hold it when she saw what it was. If your images are so negatively received, how do you expect your message to get across?” “ It sounds like my message did get across. She was repulsed by the thought of Thermonuclear Armageddon and didn’t want any part of it.” “ But it scares people so, isn’t . . . . ” “ I want to scare them. If everyone stuck a picture of an atomic explosion destroying their own city on the wall where they could see it every morning, it might help jar them out of their complacency and motivate them into action.” I guess I was expecting shelves of canned goods, stacks of survival gear and racks of rifles on the inside, but instead the fourteen-foot-high walls are covered with paintings of wildlife and mountains. Some of them quite large. “ People can’t live with that kind of negativism every day.” “ They’ re living with it every day, whether they want to or not. I’ve only painted seven cities being nuked. The military is ready to take out every major city on the planet. Tha t’s the reality. . .the scary reality.” “Well, blowing up the Kremlin and the White House is one thing, but what ever possessed you to blow up Disneyland? Is nothing sacred?” “What’s the matter? Do you want kids to live in a fantasyland? Do you think they won’t melt with the rest of L.A.?” We continued arguing over lunch— salad right out of his garden and fresh salmon pulled from the river and smoked that morning. Then he suggests that we take advantage of the sunshine. “ Let’s go out and chop some wood.” Behind the studio is a pile of some fifty or sixty full-size trees. “This ought to get you through a nuclear winter,” I joke. “At least until January,” he returns seriously. “ I’ ll need to get another load soon.” Some of the wood is already bucked up and I set up a piece while he grabs a large maul ax. “ Do you really think it’s inevitable that we go to war again. Or is there some hope?” “ Hope for what?” “ For peace.” Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 37
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